by Meghan Daum
Then Jan declared loudly that she was considering killing herself. “I know just how I’d do it,” she said. What got to me about this was not that she said it but that she said it so loudly. I looked over at the next table at three impeccably dressed men whose eyes seemed to momentarily shift over to us. It seems bizarre to me now that I didn’t ask her how she planned to kill herself for fear that it was an inappropriate question. It seems bizarre that even after this meal, after I turned down their invitation to go to a late movie, after I again took cab fare from them, which I pocketed and instead rode the subway, I met Jan and Howard several more times. This went on for about a year. Howard would call every few months, and if I was in a guilty mood, which I almost always was, flagellating myself as I did about every inadequate job performance or overdue phone bill or call I screened for fear it would be them, I said yes. I said yes and continued to lie and say that I had read the afterlife books and that I, too, awaited the day of my death so I could see Brian again and that the world was hardly worth inhabiting when such a vibrant figure was removed from it.
The dynamic was this: The more I saw Jan and Howard, the more evil thoughts I harbored, which caused me guilt, which caused me to dig in my heels and see them again. This was my self-styled redemption, my faux little journey into good Samaritanism. If I saw the Petersons on a Saturday, I could be bad for the rest of the week. If I lied to Howard about the salmon, I could call a co-worker a bitch behind her back on Monday. What happened was that I began to hate the world. Just as I hated Jan and Howard for being so lax as parents that their son died of what I believed to be inertia, I hated everyone else for existing in a condition that I defined as “fake.” Like Holden Caulfield, I became obsessed with “phoniness.” I saw everyone as innate liars, as zombified self-deluders who were dangers to themselves as well as the rest of the world. I hated people who walked too slowly down the sidewalk, grocery store clerks who took too long to count the change, days when there was nothing but junk mail. I hated anything that impeded whatever I considered to be progress, whatever I had determined was my ticket to a socialized, productive life. Unlike Brian, I would pursue a career. Unlike him, I would shop at the grocery store efficiently. I would meet friends for lunch and drinks and have people over to my apartment to watch the Oscars. I would walk quickly down the street because I actually had someplace to go. I would do anything necessary to participate in what I considered to be life, which, to me, meant getting up extremely early and doing things like putting all the apartment’s trash into a small plastic bag, which I would throw out on the way to the club to go swimming, after which I would go to work, and for lunch go to the gourmet deli on Forty-sixth Street, where I would tap my fingers on the counter if the people in front of me were taking too long to order, because I had somewhere to be, because I was impressively busy with this thing called life, because I was sternly committed to the pursuit of whatever was the opposite of death.
By the following Christmas, Jan and Howard had stopped calling me. I had expected to hear from them around the anniversary of Brian’s death, the one-year mark of the Clinton administration. When they didn’t call I imagined them dead in their poorly decorated house. I imagined empty sleeping pill bottles on the night table, or a hose hooked up to the back of the Oldsmobile with Howard’s lifeless body five feet away. Since I’d never learned how they planned to kill themselves, it was difficult to put my finger on one particular scenario. Like “the situation” itself, there seemed so many variations on the truth, so many evil interpretations of events upon which to fixate. Through one of our mutual friends, I learned they hadn’t killed themselves. Like a normal person, this friend, in town for Christmas, had called Jan and Howard himself and then driven over to the house. Like a good person, he sat in the living room and spoke honestly about this horrible thing that had happened. Unlike me, he saw no reason to lie. Unlike me, he wasn’t hung up on some twisted symbolism, on some mean-spirited rationalization employed to keep fear at bay, to keep grief a thing depicted in movies rather than a loss felt in one’s own flesh.
Here’s another true scene from the movie. It’s a flashback, a time I remember with Brian from when we were small, playing with other kids. We stood in a circle and called off our teams, the reds versus the blues, something like that. Then we needed an “it,” a dreaded tagger who would tap us on the shoulder and freeze us. No one wanted the job, including myself, and I’d watched as Brian just stood there, silent amid the chants, bewildered as the shouting came over him. “Not it!” I yelled. “Not it!” someone else yelled. “Not it!” we all said until there was no one but Brian, a pale and clueless eight-year-old, suspended in those moments before realizing he’d lost the game. And so it was him. He was it.
Acknowledgments
These essays arose from my good fortune of being in the wrong places at the right times just as often as I’ve stumbled into the right places at the right times. I am indebted to a number of wise people who have shown me the value of not always knowing wrong from right. Thanks to Michael Scammell, for noticing; Joshua Sessions, for reading (and reading and reading); Sarah Wolf, Emilie Dyer, Sara Eckel and Alison Schecter for talking and listening (and reading); and Sloan Harris, for waiting.
Thomas Beller was one of my earliest champions. He’s one of the rare people whose taste fuels his energy rather than depletes it and I’m privileged to be a beneficiary of his chutzpah and goodwill. I am grateful to Robert Bingham, Daniel Pinchbeck, and all of the editors of Open City, especially to Joanna Yas, who doesn’t let her ability to actually get things done detract from her imagination, foresight, and talent.
The ultimate thanks goes to my parents; Glen Daum, who taught me, through music, everything I know about writing a sentence; and Rachael Daum, who passed along the drive to get those sentences read.
MEGHAN DAUM is an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of several books, including The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (FSG, 2014). She is the editor of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (Picador, 2015). She has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Vogue, and contributed to NPR’s Morning Edition and This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two dogs.
MY MISSPENT YOUTH. Copyright © 2001 by Meghan Daum. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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These essays have previously appeared in different form in the following publications: “On the Fringes of the Physical World” in The New Yorker and Personals: Dreams and Nightmares from the Lives of 20 Young Writers; “Publishing and Other Near-Death Experiences” in The New York Times Book Review; “My Misspent Youth” in The New Yorker; “Inside the Tube” in Open City; “According to the Women I’m Fairly Pretty” in Nerve; “American Shiksa” in GQ; “Music Is My Bag” in Harper’s; “Variations on Grief” in The Bellingham Review and The KGB Bar Reader.
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First published in the United States by Open City Books
First Picador eBook Edition: December 2014
eISBN 9781250067692
First eBook edition: November 2014